Piers Hellawell, commissioned by Moving on Music

About the commission

Avant-garde composer Piers Hellawell and zany improvising virtuosi Bourne Davis Kane collide in a shared space; the goal is music created by all of them. Both parties leave behind established writing methods to learn from one another, undermining assumptions about the improvising and notation of music.

“For a composer, to have musical heroes is often to dream of collaborating with them. I have long admired Bourne Davis Kane for sharply defined musical ideas that lie beyond stylistic categories, and it is a dream to be given a platform for feeding my own materials into their unique imaginative machine.” Piers Hellawell

“We are delighted to have been selected to commission Piers Hellawell to collaborate with Bourne/Davis/Kane. It fits exactly what Moving on Music aims to do as a company: provide opportunities for fearless creative musicians to present new, challenging work to as wide a public as possible.” Moving on Music

More about the composer

Piers Hellawell’s work has been commissioned and performed around the world, featuring special collaborations with a number of leading artists. Large projects since his 1999 Proms debut (Inside Story) have included ‘Cors de Chasse’, a double concerto commissioned for Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet) and Jonas Bylund (trombone) by the Philharmonia Orchestra and ‘Degrees of Separation’, the commissioned work for the opening of The Sage Gateshead on the Tyne (both in 2004). ‘Dogs and Wolves’, a commission for the BBC Scottish SO’s first series in City Halls, was premiered in 2006 and recorded the following year.

Hellawell’s works are represented on CD on the ECM New Series, NMC and Metier labels, alongside three critically acclaimed discs of his music from the Metronome label. May 2012 saw the issue of ‘Airs, Waters’, Hellawell’s first recording on the Delphian label.

Piers is Professor of Composition at the Queen’s University of Belfast; his music is published by Edition Peters (London) Ltd.